In a typical call center environment, routing of inbound calls is conducted without any advance knowledge of the caller's intent or reason behind the call. For example, some call centers simply route calls in a first-in-first-out (FIFO) manner to available customer service representatives (CSRs) without regard to the reason for the call or the skillset of the individual CSRs—as some CSRs may be better equipped or experienced to handle specific types of calls. In this scenario, it is not uncommon for a single call to be manually rerouted to multiple different CSRs before reaching an appropriate representative. As a result, the average time for calls on hold and for support resolution increases, adversely affecting the customer experience.
In another scenario, call centers are configured to obtain just-in-time information about the caller and/or call, usually by leveraging automated systems such as interactive voice response (IVR) technology or automated attendants, and then route the call to a CSR based upon this information. In these examples, the IVR prompts are typically limited to predefined, broad options and generally do not accurately reflect the specific intent behind a customer's call. As a result, it may take several minutes for a customer to navigate an IVR menu in order to reach a CSR, and yet the CSR may still have to request or verify such information from a caller before the CSR can fully understand why the customer is calling and formulate an appropriate response. In addition, current IVR systems—even systems that utilize natural language-driven processing—only capture a single intent from a customer call. Most such calls are multi-intent and usually need to be sent to a higher skill CSR in order to avoid further transfers and improve the customer experience.
In both scenarios, the call center system is not configured to obtain any pre-call knowledge about the potential intent behind the incoming call. However, in many instances, a caller contacts a customer service center after first interacting with the same organization in another capacity, namely, via web browsing. For example, a customer may use his computing device to navigate to the organization's website and search or click for information that may be responsive to his needs—resulting in the generation of clickstream data associated with the customer's browsing session. Such clickstream data contains a myriad of information, such as URLs, search queries, metadata, and the like that is potentially relevant to future interactions with the same customer. Upon obtaining some information (or being unable to fully obtain the desired information) from the website, the customer may initiate a voice call to the call center of the organization for additional assistance.